Abstract
As interdisciplinary branches of ecology are developing rapidly in the 21st century, contents of ecological researches have become more abundant than ever before. Along with the exponential growth of number of published literatures, it is more and more difficult for ecologists to get a clear picture of their discipline. Nevertheless, the era of big data has brought us massive information of well documented historical literature and various techniques of data processing, which greatly facilitates the implementation of bibliometric analysis on ecology. Frequency has long been used as the primary metric in keyword analysis to detect ecological hotspots, however, this method could be somewhat biased. In our study, we have suggested a method called PAFit to measure keyword popularity, which considered ecology-related topics in a large temporal dynamical knowledge network, and found out the popularity of ecological topics follows the “rich get richer” and “fit get richer” mechanism. Feasibility of network analysis and its superiority over simply using frequency had been explored and justified, and PAFit was testified by its outstanding performance of prediction on the growth of frequency and degree. In addition, our research also encourages ecologists to consider their domain knowledge in a large dynamical network, and be ready to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations when necessary.
Highlights
In 1994, historian Donald Worster had made an interesting remark in his book, “Ecology achieved intellectual sophistication, academic prominence, and financial security in the postwar years, and lost much of its coherence
This has opened a door for discipline integration, and various branches of ecology had emerged in recent decades, with new theories, methods and technologies [2]
When we used PAFit to measure popularity, we got an adjusted R2, if adding frequency to do multiple regression was not going to rise up overall R2, PAFit might contain enough power to depict popularity. In another way, when we have the R2 yielded by the Measuring popularity of ecological topics in a temporal dynamical knowledge network frequency alone, and we found that including PAFit could promote the overall R2, we could conclude that PAFit contains some explanatory power that frequency could not offer
Summary
In 1994, historian Donald Worster had made an interesting remark in his book, “Ecology achieved intellectual sophistication, academic prominence, and financial security in the postwar years, and lost much of its coherence It broke down into a cacophony of subfields, including ecosystematists, populationists, biospherians, theoretical modelers, forest and range managers, agroecologists, toxicologists, limnologists, and biogeographers” [1]. Relations between biological systems and surrounding environments are of great complexity, numerous disciplines are joining ecology to answer demanding ecological questions and meet the global challenge. This has opened a door for discipline integration, and various branches of ecology had emerged in recent decades, with new theories, methods and technologies [2].
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